Virtual machines made easier

VMWare offers " virtual machine " technology that has - until now - been more useful for marketing folk or in the testing lab than as a technology for use on your production network.

Most people familiar with the company know the workstation product advertised as " Run the Operating Systems You Need. All at Once. " It allows you to partition an Intel-based computer to multitask operating systems so you can demonstrate a client-server system with the client and server running on the same PC (even a single laptop - a boon to road-warrior marketing types). You also can simulate your network in the laboratory on a handful of machines by running multiple operating systems on each.

VMWare makes an enterprise-ready version of this, called ESX Server, but it's expensive, runs on a fairly limited selection of hardware and can be daunting to the typical network manager. Now the company has released a new product that's lower in price, runs on more hardware and is easier to administer.

The new GSX Server (first introduced for the Linux platform in January, now available in a Windows NT4/Win2K version) runs as an application on top of your Windows or Linux server. It essentially segments the server into sandboxes that will run your operating system of choice. For example, you could have a single Win2K server but with the addition of GSX you could run multiple, simultaneous Windows and Linux server sessions on it (or NetWare, Windows 3.1, DOS, OS/2 - almost any Intel-based operating system).

One reason the number of physical servers you manage keeps going up is that you want to isolate services - Exchange on one box and SQLServer on another, for example - because you're leery of how they'll interact. A second reason is that different applications you've chosen to use (Apache Web Server, maybe, alongside GroupWise) work best on different platforms (Linux and NetWare in this case).

Now you can run those services on the same box, and use your Windows 2000 server knowledge to manage the whole thing (especially the hardware) while still providing the best operating environment for the applications you want to run. And you can do it all for less than the cost of building and maintaining more physical servers!

If you're running out of room in the server closet or you just want fewer boxes to manage, investigate VMWare's GSX server.

Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. His most recent book is "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks" published by SAMS. Dave's company, Virtual Quill, provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more at Virtual Quill or by e-mail at info@vquill.com

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